Cities That Could Crush Personality

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29931, 19 September 1962, Page 17

Cities That Could Crush Personality

Present-day society would have to alter greatly before it could exist in envisaged cities of the future which, to save valuable arable land, had been conceived on lakes and in mountains, said Mr A. L. Mitchener in the third lunch-hour address at the exhibition of visionary architecture

In the past, cities had grown as organic things. They began as villages, expanded over generations as the population increased and had been embellished as the culture of their inhabitants developed. Up to the nineteenth century, cities remained cm a "human scale"—people could travel in a comparatively short time, to all sectors, so there was communion throughout. It was a personal and complete entity in which all people belonged together. With the nineteenth century came that curious phenomenon, the suburb, which lost identity with city and whose people no longer considered themselves part of the city, he said. Many of the visionary schemes envisaged the building, in one project, of a complete city. A population could easily be injected into them, but culture would be

jeopardised because the society would not have been the product of the development of that city. Mr Mitchener said “Culture is essentially a small-scale thing, developed over generations of personal contact,” he said. Without the transference oi this culture such cities would just be factories for housing people. Personality would be crushed. In the completely planned city the familiar would disappear—humanism would be subjected, said Mr Mitchener. More than any other artist, an architect had to be sensitive to social phenomena and catering for individual expression and culture was one of the major problems in planning the perfect city. In present-day cities, . this was often overcome by erecting huge buildings within ample natural surroundings so that families living in them would not be oppressed by cliffs of concrete surrounded by acres of asphalt. In the future, however, arable land could become too valuable to use in this way and cities, as shown in some of the exhibited schemes, would be built on lakes, on shores, or in mountains. With modem technology, completely artificial environments could be created, he said.